What kind of printers are supported?

Our goal is to support most printers that are connected to a OneCare PC via a USB cable.

What are the environmental pre-requisites for printer sharing to work?

Let's call machines to which printer is attached as host and call the other machine client
* Both should be part of same OneCare Circle
* Networking
* Both should be connected to same router.They can be connected via different means such as one machine is wired and other is connected wirelessly. Technically, they need to be part of same subnet.
* Both machines should be able to "see" each other on the network.
* Both machine's OneCare firewall should be "home or work" zone.
* Should have same architecture i.e. either both are 32 bit machines or both are 64 bit machines
* Both machines should be turned ON at the same time

What kind printers are not supported?

* Network Printers: These are the printers that are directly connect to your network via an ethernet wire or a WiFi connection

* Wireless Printers: These are essentially network printers that do not appear as network printers to Windows.

* Software Printers: These are not really physical printers but software components that look like Printers e.g. Fax, Send to OneNote, Print to XPS. We have also noticed a whole bunch of software that creates a PDF file from application etc.

* Printers that do not work well in "sharing" mode. We will add printers to this list based on information received via various sources e.g. telemetry data, customer support calls, online research etc.

* Really Old printers: We support so called "version 3" or user mode drivers. Before Windows XP, printer driver used to be kernel mode. Since Windows XP has been around a long time now, almost all printers these days ship with user mode drivers.